The butch manual : the current drag and how to do it
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Title
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The butch manual : the current drag and how to do it
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Description
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A tongue-in-cheek manual for gay men on how to appear more ‘butch’, or stereotypically masculine, written in the style of a women’s magazine – complete with a problem page featuring Gertrude Stein as a fictional agony aunt. Butch men shun smiling, screaming and “misquoting Dorothy Parker” in favour of moustaches, yelling and talking dirty, according to author, model and artist Clark Henley (1950-1988). The book is undoubtedly influenced by the wildly popular contemporary humorous titles ‘The Official Preppy Handbook’ (1980) and ‘The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook’ (1982). Henley also drew the rare 1976 ‘Tails of the City’ ‘Alligator Oz’ map of San Francisco, a gay map of the city populated by cartoon alligators, and ‘A Butch Look at America’ (1982), in which the United States is represented by torn cut-off jeans over bare buttocks. Diagnosed HIV-positive in 1986, Henley died in San Francisco of AIDS-related causes in 1988, aged just 38.
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Rights
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All images within the Seized Books! Online exhibition are to be used exclusively for the promotion of the library and to facilitate research. If you download and subsequently share any images from the exhibition website, you agree it is your responsibility to ensure appropriate usage is upheld for that image. Commercial use or distribution of this content is not permitted without prior permission of the copyright holder. Copyright to content may be held by authors, artists, or their heirs, or may be in the public domain. Senate House Library does not automatically claim copyright on any images shown in the Seized Books! online exhibition.
